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IJE Advance Access originally published online on June 22, 2007
International Journal of Epidemiology 2007 36(3):631-632; doi:10.1093/ije/dym084
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Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Epidemiological Association 2007.
The online version of this article has been published under an open access model. Users are entitled to use, reproduce, disseminate, or display the open access version of this article for non-commercial purposes provided that: the original authorship is properly and fully attributed; the Journal and Oxford University Press are attributed as the original place of publication with the correct citation details given; if an article is subsequently reproduced or disseminated not in its entirety but only in part or as a derivative work this must be clearly indicated. For commercial re-use, please contact journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Commentary: Observational studies and the art of accurately measuring influenza vaccine benefits

Lone Simonsen

Laboratory of Infectious Diseases, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, USA.

Corresponding author. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health, 6700B Rockledge Drive, room 1107, Bethesda 20892, Maryland, USA. E-mail: lsimonsen@niaid.nih.gov

Accepted 22 March 2007

The first 10% of the full text of this article appears below.

As Orenstein and colleagues point out in an elegant paper in this issue,1 observational studies that compare the incidence of influenza-like illness in vaccinated and unvaccinated groups are theoretically prone to underestimating the vaccine's true effectiveness (VE). This is because many other respiratory pathogens cause similar symptoms; these other infections form a sizeable background of influenza-like illness cases in both case and control groups that are not preventable by influenza vaccination. Orenstein et al. reasonably call for laboratory confirmed endpoints, which have rarely been obtained in observational studies of influenza vaccine effectiveness in populations targeted for vaccination. These theoretical effects of low endpoint specificity are perhaps not so novel, but this paper and . . . [Full Text of this Article]


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